Have you noticed how babies seem so very flexible? How they are able to suck their toes with no effort at all?

This is because babies have soft supple bones, with a large proportion of cartilage. This is also because babies have many more bones than adults.

Babies are born with over 300 bones in their little bodies, but as time goes by, some of these bones ossify or fuse with one another, creating bigger bones.

The process of Ossification is basically that of deposition of calcium in cartilage to turn it into bone and make it harder. So when a baby is born with more than three hundred bones, over the years those will ossify and form bigger bones reducing the actual number of bones in the body.

One example of ossification is the knee cap or the patella. Did you know that when babies are born they have no knee caps? They continue not to have knee caps until they are 2 to 6 years of age! Between the ages of two and six, most babies’ patella ossifies and only then does the baby have knee caps!